


if i saw you every day for the rest of my life

by nise_kazura



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: #cryingcannibalnoises, Angst, Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Ghosts, Hallucinations, M/M, S3 AU, Suicide, Whump, post-mizumono
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21713092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nise_kazura/pseuds/nise_kazura
Summary: Will comes to him in the middle of the day. He sits at Hannibal’s table, smelling of that awful aftershave and in his ill-fitting clothes and with those curls that he styled just for Hannibal. His presence grounds Hannibal in a way he hadn’t realized he’d lost in his fanciful flight to Europe, slipping on the masks of dead men and flitting amongst the airy, high-minded society of elitist academics. Will absorbs the color around him, sunlight and dust and gleaming wood, drawing all attention to him so that his surroundings dim against the way he radiates that quiet, restless power Hannibal had worked so hard to tease out from inside.He looks so alive.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 239
Collections: Hannigram Kinkmeme





	if i saw you every day for the rest of my life

**Author's Note:**

> for round 1 of hannibal whumpfest on twitter!

When he hears of it, he doesn’t believe it, not really. He’d been privately amused, actually. The FBI and their little games. Will should know better than to hide from him now.

 _TRAGEDY AT THE BAU,_ Tattlecrime’s front page read.

_As faithful readers know, a week ago our favorite FBI consultant, Will Graham, had been grievously injured after a deadly encounter with the man that we now know is the Chesapeake Ripper, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, who had previously been acting as Will Graham’s psychiatrist. In a truly unfortunate turn of events—_

And at this, Hannibal has to smile, a little. Freddie Lounds, fresh from her dramatic resurrection, already doggedly chasing after Will Graham and his reputation, jumping on the chance to profit off his supposed death—

_—it seems that Agent Graham succumbed to his injuries, and died tragically this morning at the Mercy Medical Center._

He hadn’t bothered to read the rest of the article, simply content with the knowledge that Jack Crawford likely had Will Graham under witness protection, right within his reach. That meant that Will would eventually be sucked into the pursuit, into the grand game of cat-and-mouse that Hannibal had concocted for them in the streets of Florence.

Whether by Jack Crawford’s order or on his own, Will would come after him.

Of that much, he was certain.

* * *

Will comes to him in the middle of the day. He sits at Hannibal’s table, smelling of that awful aftershave and in his ill-fitting clothes and with those curls that he styled just for Hannibal. His presence grounds Hannibal in a way he hadn’t realized he’d lost in his fanciful flight to Europe, slipping on the masks of dead men and flitting amongst the airy, high-minded society of elitist academics. Will absorbs the color around him, sunlight and dust and gleaming wood, drawing all attention to him so that his surroundings dim against the way he radiates that quiet, restless power Hannibal had worked so hard to tease out from inside.

He looks so alive.

“Will,” Hannibal says, pausing. “It’s good to see you again.”

It is, and it isn’t. The betrayal still stings. He is still mourning, and seeing Will reminds him of everything he’d wanted, everything he’d thought he’d had before it turned to smoke and ash and blood and shards of shattered teacups in his hands.

Will tilts his head in that way that Hannibal recognizes from himself.

“You left me with a smile,” Will says, as though that were enough to repair everything that had happened between them.

“Something to remember me by.”

“You branded me,” Will corrects, but his tone isn’t quite accusatory. It’s a bit fond, really. “You wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t changed you.”

Now that they’ve come this far, Hannibal can admit that he’s right. That he isn’t and wasn’t as untouchable as he thought he was, as he’d acted like he was.

“How did you find me?” He hadn’t expected Will to be quite so fast. He’d underestimated him.

“I never left,” Will answers. “I am always with you.”

That much is true, so Hannibal allows it.

“What will you do now?”

Hannibal never knew what to expect from Will’s imminent arrival. He never knew what to expect of Will, ever. 

“Nothing.” Will said. “Wait.”

“For what? For Jack Crawford’s arrival?”

Will’s husky laugh rasps quietly like pages torn from a book. Hannibal wants to write poetry on it, tattoo ink bleeding into its fibers as he writes odes to Will and their vertiginous communion.

“No,” Will says. “Not Jack Crawford. For you.”

“You reject my offer to extend your own?”

It’s just a wry quirk of his lips, but the small dimple that winks at Hannibal from the corner of Will’s mouth colors his vision dewy rose and tenderized meat pink. He finds that he can’t quite keep himself from smiling back.

“Hannibal?” Bedelia calls out. “Hannibal, what are you doing?”

Hannibal blinks, and the afterimage of Will’s smile glows blue like starlight, hovering in the space he’d once occupied.

* * *

The next time he sees Will, he is watching silently as Hannibal gives a lecture on historical torture devices in the museum.

 _“But you’re above these, aren’t you,”_ the words float by Hannibal’s ear, the ghost of lips brushing the delicate shell where the skin is thinnest, exposing capillaries and blood, _“your torture is subtler. Nuanced. Sweet, like the taste of a struck match dipped in dessert wine.”_

Will’s voice seeps into his skin, curls snake-like around his throat the way promises do.

He’s right, of course.

Hannibal has always been sweet on Will.

He knows, this time, that Will isn’t real. Hallucinations had been Will’s problem, not Hannibal’s. But Hannibal supposes, if he were to start hallucinating, it is only right that it be of Will. He wonders, abstractly, what it is about this situation that has caused his mind to break in this specific way. What part of him yearns for Will and all of the hurt that thinking about him brings, yearns still for what had been lost, for what Will had thrown away. What part of him craves even the sharp taste of his own pain, as long as it meant that Will was there with him.

He finishes his lecture to enthusiastic applause, and waits for Will to come closer.

What he gets, instead, is Anthony Dimmond.

* * *

They watch the body dragging itself across the floor. Slow-moving, like the stretch of a snail’s eyestalk. Reaching, ever-reaching.

“I suppose this is my fault, too?” Will asks.

“Not entirely.”

Bedelia is a window rattling underneath the batterment of a winter storm. Withstands the wind, yet the cold still seeps through along the edges of the pane. A naked barrier, open to the piercing gaze—to Hannibal. A truly revolutionary level of transparency that hadn’t existed between them before.

“Observe, or participate.” Hannibal’s words crack open an unwonted frisson that drives her into the ground, roots her just there.

“What?” Her voice is very faint.

Will circles, watching. Hannibal feels his cruel laughter like the echo of a lover’s touch.

“Are you, in this moment, observing or participating?”

Her blink is slow and dazed, uncomprehending.

“Observing,” she breathes.

Her eyes are blue, but not the right blue. The dull blood splatter across her cheek seems to drain her, leave her shivering and brittle before them. Will says nothing. He doesn’t need to. Hannibal’s sudden, black rage does not disturb the surface of the water, but it crawls beneath the thin ice that glitters in his dark eyes.

“Hannibal,” Will warns.

Hannibal does not listen. He stares at her, the uncanny flatness of his eyes swallowing the oxygen in the room.

“I was curious,” she says, finally.

“Curious,” Hannibal repeats. He turns slightly, postured to indicate the body still inching its way between them. “Curious, she says. Were you ever curious?”

Will’s reptilian turn of the head mirrors Hannibal’s.

“I had never let myself be,” he answers. “Did that disappoint you?”

“Disappointment is a kind of betrayal,” Hannibal says. “Have you betrayed me yet again, Will?”

Bedelia gulps, taking a slow step backwards. Though he does not turn to face her, Hannibal notices.

“I haven’t betrayed _you_ yet, have I, Bedelia?”

She continues to lean away, a spoon wobbling on the edge of a knife.

“No.”

“That’s good, isn’t it. I’d hate to disappoint.”

He holds out his hand.

Bedelia teeters towards him in slow motion, limbs weak like limp puppet strings. She takes it. Lets him guide her towards the door.

“Shall I count to three?”

Tears tremble on her cheeks.

“No? All right.”

His hands cover hers. They’re positioned along the chin, grasping the jawbone. Drag along the vulnerable, exposed neck. 

Hannibal doesn’t count. He simply pulls, and twists. The snap travels from Bedelia’s fingertips and up her arms. Etches itself into her brain. She scarcely breathes. Hannibal leans in.

“That’s participation,” he says, low.

He lets her go. She closes her eyes.

Hannibal’s nostrils flare and he angrily shakes free his pocket square, the curl of his lip suggesting a sneer. Will regards him with gentle eyes. It hurts for Hannibal to look at him. Hannibal’s fondness and longing gather themselves together into a single corkscrew that twists and winds up everything inside him like rusty gears.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough.

Bedelia is still standing there, hands held away from her sides, shaking. In this moment, he hates her. It isn’t a pure, clean hatred. It is jagged and sharp, splintering into the skin that grasps it. He doesn’t bother to hide it.

“That was rude, you know,” Will remarks.

Hannibal should care. He can’t, not around the tormented ache in his chest, lodged beneath his sternum.

“You can’t blame someone for not being who you want them to be,” Will continues. “If you miss me that much, you should do something about it.”

Hannibal’s pettiness makes him refuse the hallucination his acknowledgement for the first time that night.

 _It is just one disappointment after another,_ he thinks, bitter and tired.

This, is what a broken heart looks like, he realizes.

He picks up his scalpel.

* * *

When the knife passes through Professor Sogliato’s skull, at most Hannibal feels a sense of droll boredom. It was nothing like ripping a linoleum knife through Will’s stomach. Nothing like the bright echo of pain they’d reflected on each other, mirrors they both were, a feedback loop that soared and screeched into singularity. In that moment they’d been bared, open. Souls like live wires, touching. The open wound with its raw edges had scarred over, gnarly, into a Will-shaped hollow tucked between Hannibal’s ribs.

“You don’t have to make sacrifices to appeal to me as your God, you know. That’s not _my_ job, is it.”

Will gives him an admonishing look from where he leans against the wall, sipping a too-full glass of wine.

Seeing Will like this makes Hannibal want to touch him. Feel him. By God, even after everything, he misses him. Even after everything, he knows that Will and he were meant to be together.

He wants him to be real, so the best he can do is make it so that the real Will Graham can find him.

Easily, and quickly.

Hannibal aches to let go of his hurt, aches to forgive. But he refuses to be the one to seek Will out first. He refuses to be the one lured again. This time, he’ll have Will bite down on an enticing meal only to discover barbed metal embedding itself behind his teeth.

Bedelia looks shaken. She follows his line of sight to the wall where Will leans, languid and refined, the shadows softly caressing every feature with soft bristles.

She wisely says nothing this time.

* * *

“Your…obsession with Will Graham is no longer within your realm of control.”

They’re alone today. Hannibal’s hands slide through Bedelia’s hair, the flaxen strands slipping through his fingers like silk.

Hannibal is curious as to what she means by this. As to what she could possibly understand about him and Will. He hums his assent, but otherwise remains silent, large palms cradling the fine curvature of her skull.

“The lack of mutuality engendered a resentment opposite to your affection,” she continues. “You often deal with dialectical opposites. It is a…specialty of yours. What made this one so different?”

His fingers trace the outside edge of her ear. She flutters her eyes closed.

“Love,” he says, “by definition, as a madness, isn’t conducive to control.”

“It made you reckless.”

“Foolish,” Hannibal agrees.

“What is regret like for you, Hannibal?”

Hannibal’s hands pause momentarily, fingers pressed into her scalp, mid-motion.

“I do not regret anything I’ve done involving Will. I only regret the outcome.”

After a brief moment, he continues massaging, the foamy lather gathering underneath his fingers.

“You’ve already forgiven him.”

“No, not yet. But I need to.”

The need is near unbearable, a constant yearning to let _go,_ warring with the deep-seated, aching hurt that still flinches, tender and bleeding, every time he prods at it.

“You need to, in order to move on,” Bedelia agrees.

Hannibal wonders if moving on is possible, for him and Will. If that is, in fact, what he really desires.

Bedelia seems to sense his ambivalence.

“Hannibal,” she says, and the stiffness in her features seems to indicate her awareness of their positions, of the power he has in his hands, of the way they’re wrapped around the base of her skull, both supporting and threatening. “You have to face the reason behind your delusions eventually.”

Hannibal is aware that the Will he sees isn’t real. He’s aware that they’re hallucinations. But that’s not what Bedelia means.

What she proposes is preposterous.

Hannibal is sure that he’d know. That somehow, he’d be able to tell if Will Graham were really gone from this world. Something inside him would have reacted.

It is impossible for Will to have died before Hannibal was done with him. Before Hannibal has found a way to let go of the hurt.

And there is only one way for him to let go of the hurt.

“I have to eat him.”

Bedelia slowly sits up, water and soap and hair cascading down her shoulders as she turns to regard him. She studies his face, peers between the stitches in that peculiar way she has, and doesn’t seem to like what she finds.

* * *

The first touch is smell. The rest follows, bleeding through the nothingness in slants and tones. Rosewood and lemon oil conjure shapes. Leather and books illuminate the colors and shades. And Will’s horrendous aftershave carries in the light.

He’s standing by the window in the office of Hannibal’s Baltimore practice.

He looks like… himself. Tired, a perpetual furrow between his brows. Lips pursed, the crepuscular darkness in his eyes peering contrapuntal to the dissonant curl at the corner of his lips.

There’s an indistinct crispness to the details, a manner of melting away where his attention is not directed that tells him—this is a dream.

But is it his?

His office has a place in his mind palace, of course, but there it is always 7:30pm, and Will is waiting just beyond the door. Sweet anticipation, crystallized. Their conversations float between the dust motes like silvery serpents that occasionally light upon his shoulders and slither into his ear, the vowels and consonants slipping off flickering tongues, sibilant and precious. But here, the even, grey, winter light reposes on the planes of WIll’s face, set like plaster. Dwindling twilight, frozen dusk.

He is beautiful.

Will’s name collects on Hannibal’s lip like fermented dew—sipped from the air, drawn over his tongue, rolled under the soft palate. He sinks into the soft hum of the single syllable resonating deep in his throat. Lets it settle, coruscate between them, a quiet dazzle.

Will.

Will turns to face him and he looks like just yesterday, like a year ago, like one blink severing this moment into the next.

Heavens above, is he beautiful.

“I shouldn’t be here,” Will says.

“And yet.” Hannibal is pleased. Will does that frown that’s an almost-smile.

“Stubborn,” Will chides, and Hannibal lets himself preen.

They resume their seats. Hannibal folds his hands at his waist, puts on the psychiatrist face that Will loves to hate.

“I don’t know how much time we have.”

Time is of no consequence here. Not for them. Hannibal says as much.

“It may not matter to me, but it does to you.”

Does Will see Hannibal as bound in ways he isn’t? Are they not equals?

“No. You won, didn’t you?” Will’s smile is wry. “Or maybe you didn’t.”

He gets up, fidgety and restless as he always is, and Hannibal traces the path he weaves with his eyes, watching, always watching. Unable to stop. Unwilling to disenthrall himself.

“I forgave you. Before.” Will’s voice quavers, maintaining a veneer of flatness that betrays emotion.

Though Will may have, Hannibal hasn’t. Won’t. Even now, in his yearning, he views Will’s beauty like a page in need of tearing, perfection in need of defilement, flesh in need of rending.

“You don’t have to,” Will says. “But I wanted you to know. I forgive you.”

His voice hangs in the air, hooked and speared. The cards settling; the creak of a door letting in the winter cold and releasing a breath of animal warmth, dissipating and disappearing and leaving bare the skin, the house, the home to the untamed outside.

Will looks him in the eye, and it feels like the first and last time. The shock of his blue gaze is like being awake. Hannibal suddenly gets the feeling that he’s missing something, that he hasn’t been paying attention and somehow, there’s something he needs to know that he’s forgotten.

His animal senses are prickling. There is a threat in the room, but it isn’t him that’s being threatened. It’s _them._

“God knows you don’t deserve it,” Will continues, “but I do.”

Hannibal tries to ignore it. Continues down the path of thought like a woodsman trailblazing.

If it’s earned, it isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness is a shift in scales, a further unbalancing. That’s what affords it weight, meaning—the fact that it is only given to or withheld from the undeserving. 

It’s why Hannibal has yet to return the favor.

Will places a hand on the back of the chair he’d always sat in, looking down on it for a long moment, fond. The action sets Hannibal’s instincts screaming again. There is something wrong.

There is a finality to it. A dawning sensation of imminent horror. Of panic he’d fought to make unfamiliar to him.

It is God.

Will—

“I’m not afraid of death. Of hell. Of whatever’s waiting for me on the other side. That’s not why I stayed with you.”

Hannibal clutches the armrests of his chair. The clock moves. Clarity is just beyond his grasp, he can feel his own hand holding him back.

Will—

“I’m afraid of facing Abigail,” Will admits with a chuckle. “I failed her, in failing you. I’m afraid she hates me. I’m afraid she’ll remember that she was scared of me. What did you tell her? Did you tell her she didn’t have to be? Did you tell her—did you tell her I love you?”

Hannibal stumbles to his feet.

I—

“Don’t. Don’t say anything you don’t mean,” Will interrupts. His voice is harsh. Fading. “Don’t apologize. Not to me.”

Hannibal doesn’t regret anything he’s done involving Will. He only regrets the outcome.

But in the end, isn’t that the same thing?

“This isn’t goodbye,” Will promises.

It just feels like one.

“Then stay,” Hannibal pleads.

Will shakes his head. He looks like he always does, Hannibal realizes. Tired. Alone. Like he has no hope left for himself or for the rest of the world. Hannibal had never realized how much he still had left to see. To know. There is still so much between them, left unsaid—

* * *

Hannibal wakes with a gasp. He looks down at Bedelia’s hand on his arm, and snarls.

No.

No, it can’t be.

* * *

Anger makes Hannibal reckless. He leaves a trail of broken hearts all over Italy. It’s a cry of denial, of refusal. A beacon to home in on. With every kill, he dares Will to come back.

He wants to see him again. To demand that he take the brunt of Hannibal’s feelings, release him from this burden of resentment and— 

Regret.

Bedelia observes with a frightened coolness, with knowledge that he is one crack away from bursting.

“Is this what has been hiding under your person suit all this time?” she asks him one day, as he washes blood from his hands. He hasn’t bothered with the making of another kill suit. He wants to feel the blood slick between his fingers, the life dwindling and petering away.

(He’s searching for solutions. Looking for answers. Trying to understand this process that once brought him comfort and definition. Futilely recreating it over and over again in an effort to _understand_ how, _how_ this could have happened—) 

“No.” 

As though who he is could be so easily seen, so easily shown. No, only Will can see beneath his person suit. Only Will can peel back his layers and know Hannibal’s meaning.

This is just another layer, another veneer, another performance for the world.

And yet, the one that he performs for does not show himself. He hasn’t seen Will in weeks.

Jack is getting close. So is Pazzi. Hannibal welcomes them all, all the while searching the corners of his vision for a flicker of blue.

* * *

He corners Jack in a dark alleyway. He’s no longer interested in games, in watching them come after him. He wants answers.

He has an arm around his chest and the other holding a blade to his neck.

“How’s Bella,” he greets, and Jack growls.

“Hannibal,” he hisses.

“I’d really love to catch up with you, Jack, but you see I have pressing business with you.”

“Good. I have business with you, too.”

He elbows Hannibal in the side and twists away with a grunt, before grabbing Hannibal and slamming him into the wall. Hannibal kicks out, kneeing him in the stomach, and they grapple on the ground until Jack is on top, hand at Hannibal’s throat, Hannibal’s knife a threat against his gut.

“You gonna gut me? Like you did Will?”

Hannibal struggles, face turning red.

“Where—is he—”

“YOU KILLED HIM!” Jack bellows into his face.

Hannibal’s eyes flash.

“No—” 

The knife digs in. Jack gasps and in his gasp Hannibal hears the strangled cry of pain Will had given him when he’d drawn the knife across his stomach, the last time he’d touched him, cradling his head in his hand, holding him close.

Jack doesn’t seem to care that his insides are about to spill out over them both, hands tightening around Hannibal’s neck. His eyes are ablaze, he only has one goal left now.

A shadow falls over them. Before Jack can turn to see it, something hits the back of his head with a loud thud, and his eyes roll back before he slumps over Hannibal. Hannibal pushes him off with a grunt, rubbing at his bruised and sore neck, then regards the figure standing before him.

“Am I supposed to thank you?”

“I did just save your life,” Bedelia replies.

He stands, leaning closer. To get a whiff of her, of the steely gaze that she’s giving him. She leans back, but does not move away.

“No,” he says, watching her from up close. “Careful, Bedelia. Your curiosity is showing.”

She isn’t breathing, but she holds his gaze.

“You just want to know what it would be like to see me ruined. Dear Uncle Jack was going to spoil your fun.”

She inhales sharply through her nose, twists her head away in faux shame. She should know better than that, than to flash him the skin of her neck.

Hannibal turns away from her, dragging Jack over to the wall and removing both their ties so he can bind his wrists and feet.

“My mercy is running low these days,” he says. “Go on, Bedelia. I won’t ruin your fun. But the next time you get curious, remember. Remember, in the course of your transformation, just what it is that you’re becoming. Remember what I am. And think, before you try it again.”

He doesn’t look at her, watching instead the sluggish drool of blood from Jack’s stomach, the fluttering of his eyelids as he begins to wake.

By the time Jack opens his eyes, Bedelia is gone.

Hannibal leans in close, nearly nose to nose. He rests his full weight on his forearm, pressed to Jack’s chest, pinning him down.

“Where is he.”

“You really don’t believe that he’s dead,” Jack says in disbelief.

“His wounds weren’t fatal. Yours were. If you made it out alive, then so should’ve he.” Hannibal tries to keep the bitterness out of his voice. The desperation.

“There were complications in the surgery,” Jack says, “a secondary infection that spread afterwards, they tried their best—” and Hannibal’s vision goes red.

A mistake. Some incompetent, unworthy surgeon had their hands inside of Will, and they didn’t save him. _They_ killed him.

It wasn’t Hannibal’s fault. _It wasn’t Hannibal’s fault._

Hannibal reaches out, and with a twist and crack, Jack falls limp.

At one point, Hannibal had considered him something like a friend, as much as friends could be had in the lifestyle he led. But it’s of no consequence now. He has no more need for Jack. No more need for games.

* * *

If it wasn’t his fault, then it must be God’s.

Hannibal knows that some mistakes can’t be undone, but he thinks that if God didn’t know he would try to even out the scoreboard, then maybe he isn’t quite so omniscient after all.

Besides, it’s not _his_ mistake he needs to undo. It’s not his fault.

* * *

He kills the surgeon. It isn’t art, it’s not a murder tableau, but it is certainly some kind of display. Will wouldn’t even recognize him, looking at this, he thinks. Blood is splattered all over the walls, the meat sliced to ribbons, tendons cut and bones plucked from their places. Nothing but gristle and meat and Hannibal’s precise anger grinding the flesh, pulverizing it.

It’s not his fault, the surgeon’s hands are cut away.

It’s not his fault, the intestines are ripped out.

It’s not his fault, the eyes are gouged out. 

It’s not his fault, the ribs are crushed, snapped.

It’s not his fault, he’s been long dead. The blood is cold and sticky. 

It’s not his fault, and still, Hannibal is not satisfied. He breathes hard, blood coating him from head to toe. He drops the butcher’s knife with a clang, and stumbles out. 

It’s not his fault. 

* * *

He doesn’t visit the grave. They’d know to look for him there. There’s no point, either. No point, unless he wants to exhume the body, cook it, and eat it. He doesn’t want to.

* * *

He thinks about visiting Alana. He finds he doesn’t care anymore. There’s nothing tying them all together anymore. To return would be to disturb the nest. He doesn’t want to see the loss in Alana’s eyes, mirrored in his. 

* * *

He doesn’t even care about killing Mason Verger. He hears about Alana and Margot through the grapevine, and this time, allows himself to be hate them for it.

* * *

The bluff is eroding away. Hannibal can hear the distant crash of the waves below him the way he can hear the thundering of his blood in his veins. He stands by the edge and waits.

It is past nightfall when he comes, at last.

“Are you done with your hissy fit?” is the first thing Will says.

Hannibal turns to him, dark eyes glittering, face solemn. He doesn’t speak.

“I don’t suppose it’ll make you feel better to tell you that it doesn’t have to hurt,” Will says.

It doesn’t. Nothing can make Hannibal feel “better”, he’s realizing.

A wind blows past them. Hannibal can smell him on the breeze, faint. 

“Will,” he chokes out, voice raspy from disuse. “Will you let me—”

He can’t finish his sentence.

Will gives him a gentle look.

“Would you mean it this time?”

Hannibal nods. Will assesses him, measuring his sincerity, then allows it with a tilt of his head.

“Will,” Hannibal tries again. “I’m sorry.”

Will smiles, sad.

“I am too.”

They stand there, looking at each other. His outline is so faint in the dark. Ephemeral. 

“Abigail forgives you too. But you already knew that. You made sure she would.” He doesn’t look bitter, the way Hannibal thought he would. “I’m teaching her how to fish.”

He sounds content. The content is mournful.

“I wanted to surprise you.” Hannibal whispers, and he sounds so helpless. He feels so _helpless._

“You succeeded.” Will’s voice still carries in it the strains of exhaustion. Always tired. Like he wants to rest. “Are you ready to forgive yourself?”

Hannibal shakes his head, mute. Never. Never, never, never.

“Then you know what you need to do.”

He looks up at Hannibal with those blue eyes, and tilts his head, leaning in. Hannibal feels like he’s falling already. He’s being magnetized, tipping forward, head bowed. He closes his eyes as a breath of air puffs against his lips.

They brush.

Hannibal could cry, because Will is right there, and he can’t feel it. Can’t feel him.

He can’t feel it because Will is fading away, already.

“I’ll be waiting,” Will promises, and then he’s gone.

That’s more than he could ever ask.

Hannibal turns to face the roiling sea, and steps into the dark.

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally gonna go in a way different direction. as in, will's ghost taunting hannibal every time hannibal tries to enjoy something, reminding him with his every move of what he's done, asking him if he enjoys his meat, knowing that he's the reason will's dead. but then [tei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tei) happened, and everything changed halfway through LMAO. so u can thank her for that
> 
> come scream at me on twitter [@nise_kazura](https://twitter.com/nise_kazura)! :>>


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